EU Study Suggests Need to "Monitor" News

Bureaucracies like setting up commissions and groups to study things.  They get time off from real work to "study things", free travel to group meetings in nice locales, invite their friends to participate in the group, and spend money for others to really study whatever they're supposed to look at and tell them what to say about it.  And the EU is really just a gigantic bureaucracy with a veneer of democracy for show.

In this case, it's the "High Level Group on Media Freedom and Pluralism" releasing their report last week after pondering various "threats" to media independence and the independence of journalists for more than a year.  As the norm, any complaint by any group got treated as a threat,  Too much government oversight? A threat.  Too little government oversight? A threat.  Media too big and powerful? A threat. Media too weak and powerless? A threat.  27 separate sets of libel and privacy laws (one for each EU nation)?  Almost as many distinctive sets of ethical standards, professional norms, and legal rights for journalists?  A real problem in a digital world where content easily flows across national borders.

The good news is the report only outlines concerns and makes suggestions, rather than drafts new laws and regulations.  Still, you can see the underlying intent in many of the suggestions in the report and in the comments made by the group's Chair, former President of Latvia Vaire Vike-Freiberger, in a well-attended press conference announcing the report.  Frances Robinson, covering the story for the Wall Street Journal, offered a few of the juicier bits.

• Oversight needed to reign in "journalists"
  

  “There is a responsibility that goes with being a journalist,” Ms. Vike-Freiberga told the assembled hacks. But with new technology “enabling just about everybody” to access information, form an opinion, and blog it, from their phone, “trained monkeys could probably do it.”

  The report suggests a need for someone to determine who gets to be a journalist and who doesn't (i.e. licensing), although that power shouldn't be in the hands of government or left to the discretion of news outlets or journalists self-identifying.  In other words, you need an "independent body".  One that will probably also have the job of determining which journalism is "quality," and which isn't.
• One Ring to Rule Them All
  The final report actually likes the idea of "politically correct" national Media Councils with the power to punish possible offenders.  Although Europe really, really needs an EU-wide "independent" Media Council with ultimate authority, under the aegis of the European Commission (i.e. the unelected, unaccountable, EU bureaucracy).
  

  Recommendation: All EU countries should have independent media councils with a politically and culturally balanced and socially diverse membership. … Media councils should have real enforcement powers, such as the imposition of fines, orders for printed or broadcast apologies, or removal of journalistic status. The national media councils should follow a set of European-wide standards and be monitored by the Commission to ensure that they comply with European values.

•  Set a single EU standard
  The report seeks to apply to same approach EU bureaucracies favor in virtually all regulatory circumstances - replace local and national standards and regulation (outside the EU's control) with a single standard/regulation/law determined and enforced by the EU bureaucracy.
  

  Recommendation: For improving the functioning of the Single Market, further harmonisation of EU legislation would be of great benefit.

  While greater consistency in libel and privacy rules would be helpful, "harmonisation" is the most widely-hated aspect of the EU and its bureaucracy.
• Punish (successful) Intruders
  Robinson notes one recommendation suggesting using regulation to punish "dominant information providers" (i.e. Google) for being more popular than local sources and thus "restrict(ing) media freedom and pluralism."  In other words, let's promote pluralism by removing media sources... particularly those you can't control.  As the line goes, "Yeah, that's the ticket."
• Fund (and control) investigative journalism
  Not enough good investigative journalism?  Let the EU fund it, and thus influence what reporters and stories investigate.
• We Need Good PR
  The report suggests that the various EU Presidents need to meet with groups of journalists from a range of EU countries, and get wider coverage of pronouncements in other EU press.  Robinson succinctly phrased the problem that poses.
  

  EU Presidents aren’t known for breaking news in panel interviews, and hypothetical situations don’t sound promising – will a Finnish reader really want to know the Spanish commissioner’s answer to a question from a Slovenian journalist?

While I had some fun with this, there are some real issues and threats confronting journalism generally.  Some do emerge from the different roles journalism and news organizations play in different countries, and the resulting mash-up of policies, professional standards, regulation, oversight, and libel & privacy laws across the EU.  Some harmonization, or lessening of differences, would be helpful in a world where media, content, and news cross borders.  I'm just pretty doubtful that a centralized bureaucracy is the best way to accommodate cultural, political, and economic differences around the world (or within Europe).  Or how greater politicization and oversight/control promotes media freedom in the Western tradition.

Sources -  EU, Media, and Trained Monkeys, Wall Street Journal
High Level Group on Media Freedom and Pluralism website and final report,  EU Task Force on Co-ordination of Media Affairs

A Primer on "cherry-picking" stats

Most people treat numbers as real and reliable - and in most circumstances they are.  But they can also be used to be purposefully misleading, or picked through to find whatever set of numbers makes the best case for a given circumstance.  It's just part of "How to Lie With Statistics."
  The professional association of pollsters, AAPOR, knows well how this is done in the selective reporting of polls, and has guidelines for what information people really need to provide when making arguments based on polling results - guidelines that are for the most part ignored in journalistic reporting.  "Cherry-picking" results can be as problematic, particularly when only a pre-selected set of results is reported.  It's quite natural for someone who wants to use stats to support their argument to pick among the myriad variations of numbers and results those that best support their position.  And, regrettably, its quite natural for journalists to accept those numbers, or at most just verify their accuracy, rather than wondering why that particular set of numbers was used and looking at the larger picture and whether the cited results accurately reflect the underlying reality.
  There's an interesting video out that illustrates the potential issues of cherry-picking.  (While this particular one dissects an Obama campaign claim, cherry-picking is an almost universal tendency).

  Journalists in this increasingly competitive news market don't always have the luxury of time to critically evaluate every claim, even with the access to information and analysis that the Internet offers.  So when should they wonder if a claim's an accurate reflection of the larger reality?  As the video points out in its conclusion, one dead give-away is if the claim is very precisely phrased, or uses ranges or measures which don't seem to be the typical usage.    In the video's example, picking "27 months" and "7 years" as the time periods to consider.  Another is when different terms are used for the stats being provided.  In another case I recall, it was comparing "new jobs" (only those created - not considering those ending or lost) to "gains in employment" (comparing net job increase - newly created jobs minus jobs lost).
   When journalists run into these, it might be useful (not to mention enlightening) to look a bit deeper into the claims and measures.  At the very least, though, they need to be careful to use exactly the same phrasing in their reporting of the claim - even though it may make for better headlines to generalize that narrowly defined claim into statements like "Obama's created more jobs than Bush did."  Because that broader statement is not even "technically" accurate, and is easily refuted. Misinterpretations of that sort, intentional or not, can raise questions about the competence or fairness of the reporter and news organization. That kind of error or sloppiness may contribute to the public's growing mistrust of news media, and might possibly be a contributing factor to its decline.

edited to fix typos in title and body.
 

A Primer for Nonprofit News Organizations

INN (Investigative News Network) recently released a primer for nonprofit news organizations written by Elizabeth Osder and Kaizar Campwala.  The report looks at the current news landscape and the changing market dynamics, and considers what nonprofit news organizations can do to take advantage of whatever opportunities develop.  Unsurprisingly, a lot of the focus is on what INN can offer as as trade group.  Still, there's good information and insight provided.
  In simple terms, the primer suggests there is great opportunity for nonprofit news outlets in the emerging digital landscape, and with the declining costs of the technologies used to create and distribute news.  Still, giving some serious thought in developing a focused mission - identifying what news you want to provide to which audience, with what effect - setting goals, and developing strategies to reach those goals can be critical.  In part, because it can keep the news organization focused, and in part because you can then also think about what's the best opportunity for support and revenues.
  The primer offers some good ideas for nonprofit news organizations, many of which would also be beneficial for profit-oriented news outlets as well.

Source -  Audience Development and Distribution Strategies: A Primer for Nonprofit News Organizations  (Paths to Sustainability 1.0),  report from INN

Big Data and Journalism

With the rise of cheap computing and data storage has come the ability to measure and store huge amounts of data.  What's coming along a bit more slowly is the interest in, and ability to make use of all of that data.  Another jump in the ability to make use of all that info came with distributed computing - first with standalone projects like SETI@home, which used the processing power of millions of home computers to process billions of pieces of data (2 billion so far), and now the ability to harness the thousands of virtual computers in the Cloud.

So what is  Big Data and what does it have to do with the future of journalism?  The "Big Data" concept refers to the tools and processes for managing and using large datasets.  The idea of data-driven journalism, has been around for decades, but for the most part been limited to focused use of datasets to answer specific questions.  And, quite frankly, it's been severely limited by most journalist's seemingly inherent antipathy to numbers and math, as well as the decline in investigative journalism.

More recently, the concept of database journalism has emerged.  Unlike data-driven journalism, the idea of database journalism is to aggregate the materials collected by journalists into databases, which can then be used to spot trends or provide local illustrations for local versions of stories.

Neither of these fit the idea of Big Data, however.  What the Las Vegas Sun is doing with data may qualify, though - they exploit the massive amounts of audience metric generated by their online edition to suggest coverage, link to public databases to generate real-time informational maps of things like police reports, real estate listings, and retail hours  for local editions, and used public and online databases to research a story on local healthcare.

But there is the potential for much more - particularly in today's age of big data and huge document dumps (often designed to hide the big stories from easy access).  Only traditional journalism hasn't had a lot of interest in, or ability to exploit, Big Data.  From various Wikileaks dumps to the release of Stimulus-funded projects data, to Sarah Palin's emails, journalists have let others do the analysis and largely just reported what they were told (if they reported it at all).  That's a shame, because there is an unprecedented amount of publicly available information on government activities at all levels, campaign contributions and links between big money and "independent" public interest groups that should make a "watchdog" press drool.  Not to mention how monitoring search engines and social media could alert journalists to emerging issues and hot topics.  (For example, Google does a faster and better job of tracking flu outbreaks than the CDC, simply by monitoring searches for "flu remedies" and "flue symptoms.").

If journalism is to have a future, they need to do more than simply report what others say and do - they need to originate news, add value to stories, and reveal the needle in the haystack.  And doing that through Big Data, through the use and analysis of available information, is becoming easier and cheaper.  Will journalists acquire the interest and skills to do so, or will they leave that to others? (and in doing so render themselves even more irrelevant).

Source -  Big Data: Why All the Fuss?  InformationWeek Global CIO